Feist−Feist: Theories of
Personality, Seventh
EditionV. Learning Theories 15. Skinner: Behavioral
Analysis(^468) © The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2009
However, the acquaintance’s name did not exist in her mind any more than did the
car keys. Skinner (1974) summed up this procedure, saying that “techniques of re-
call are not concerned with searching a storehouse of memory but with increasing
the probability of responses” (pp. 109–110).
Problem solving also involves covert behavior and often requires the person to
covertly manipulate the relevant variables until the correct solution is found. Ulti-
mately these variables are environmental and do not spring magically from the per-
son’s mind. A chess player seems to be hopelessly trapped, surveys the board, and
suddenly makes a move that allows his marker to escape. What brought about this
unexpected burst of “insight”? He did not solve the problem in his mind. He manip-
ulated the various markers (not by touching them but in covert fashion), rejected
moves not accompanied by reinforcement, and finally selected the one that was fol-
lowed by an internal reinforcer. Although the solution may have been facilitated by
his previous experiences of reading a book on chess, listening to expert advice, or
playing the game, it was initiated by environmental contingencies and not manufac-
tured by mental machinations.
Creativity
How does the radical behaviorist account for creativity? Logically, if behavior were
nothing other than a predictable response to a stimulus, creative behavior could not
exist because only previously reinforced behavior would be emitted. Skinner (1974)
answered this problem by comparing creative behavior with natural selection in evo-
lutionary theory. “As accidental traits, arising from mutations, are selected by their
contribution to survival, so accidental variations in behavior are selected by their re-
inforcing consequences” (p. 114). Just as natural selection explains differentiation
among the species without resorting to an omnipotent creative mind, so behaviorism
accounts for novel behavior without recourse to a personal creative mind.
The concept of mutation is crucial to both natural selection and creative be-
havior. In both cases, random or accidental conditions are produced that have some
possibility of survival. Creative writers change their environment, thus producing re-
sponses that have some chance of being reinforced. When their “creativity dries up,”
they may move to a different location, travel, read, talk to others, put words on their
computer with little expectancy that they will be the finished product, or try out var-
ious words, sentences, and ideas covertly. To Skinner, then, creativity is simply the
result of randomor accidentalbehaviors (overt or covert) that happen to be re-
warded. The fact that some people are more creative than others is due both to dif-
ferences in genetic endowment and to experiences that have shaped their creative
behavior.
Unconscious Behavior
As a radical behaviorist, Skinner could not accept the notion of a storehouse of un-
conscious ideas or emotions. He did, however, accept the idea of unconscious be-
havior.In fact, because people rarely observe the relationship between genetic and
environmental variables and their own behavior, nearly all our behavior is uncon-
sciously motivated (Skinner, 1987a). In a more limited sense, behavior is labeled un-
conscious when people no longer think about it because it has been suppressed
462 Part V Learning Theories